Page:Scientific Memoirs, Vol. 1 (1837).djvu/254

242 to which modern travellers ascribe the present dry desert state of Greece, in which several streams celebrated by the ancients have totally disappeared, leaving behind a dry and barren soil, because the woods which contained their springs were wasted and destroyed through barbarism and neglect. If, lastly, we consider how essential an influence the course and deposition of rivers have upon the surface of the earth; how far all countries have been produced by their rivers (as, for instance, Lower Egypt by the Nile, or the regions of America, towards the lower part of the Mississippi, by the alluviations of this river); we find here again the bond of mutual relation and affinity which connects organized and unorganized terrestrial bodies by means of vegetable life manifested with sufficient distinctness.

As the plant may be considered a crystal continually developing itself in a constant change of its matter, in like manner the living animal body so nearly represents a plant which has reached a higher unity and faculty of self-determination, that although the animal still remains a part of a higher unity, and is closely bound to the earth by the necessities of life, yet this hold taken of the animal as compared with that taken of the plant, is even less in degree than that which we observe in the plant as compared with the unorganized body. For this very reason, the animal presents, among natural bodies, the most perfect idea of an organism (see p. 226); and as we can prove mathematically that there are only three fundamental numbers (which are continually repeated in all forms of perception, namely, unity, its division into duality, and the reunion of the unity and duality in trinity), which are exemplified in our conception of space through the threefold dimension of length, breadth, and thickness,—in like manner the threefold succession of inorganic vegetable and animal life exhibits the members which together afford the idea of an organism, viz. multiplicity, development, and unity.

Since the addition of the idea of unity constitutes the perfect idea of an organism, just as thickness, added to length and breadth, constitutes the idea of a body, it is evident that the unity of the animal body presents and affords in reality a perfect idea of an individual organism. We have already observed that the peculiarities of vegetable life may very well be collectively ascribed to its want of inward self-independence; in a similar way we may deduce all the peculiarities of the animal organism already alluded to, from the idea of perfect unity which is characteristic of animal life.

Consequence the first.—If the plant, exposed alike to gravitation and light, is divided into root and stem, into a terrestrial and an atmospheric part, the animal, being more independent, is less bound to the organism of the planet to which it originally belongs, and is consequently more